Religion and the State

Here in the UK our Prime Minister, David Cameron, held a meeting before Easter with church leaders during which he made a number of rather worrying comments.

As surveys and doubtless the 2011 census are showing, the number of people who feel they have a religion is falling.  As an element of this so is the number of those who claim to be Christians.  A recent survey commissioned by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science showed that of those who identified themselves as Christians many just did so because it was their parents religion.  Interestingly, amongst the Christians many feel as I do that the Church and State should be separate.

Having read the reports of this meeting, it seems that not only is Mr Cameron unaware of this, but that he is actively trying to fight against it (democracy?).

I felt driven to write to him about my concerns with his viewpoints and will update this post if I hear back, either from him or from one of his staff.

In essence he made a number of points as follows:

He believes that Christian values would create a happier and better society for everyone.  I will look at some of these below but for now I need to point out that Christians do not have exclusivity on morals and ethics and indeed these existed before Christianity.  Atheists also have morals and ethics and whilst any group will have 'bad apples' there is no reason to put Christians on a pedestal for their values.

He then went on to discuss the values of the Bible - this includes the Christian values he chooses to omit such as violence, explicit sexual references, child abuse, objectivisation and dehumanisation of women, aggressively genocidal racism, explicit animal cruelty and incitement to commit murder and hate crimes (my thanks to Rosa Rubicondior at http://rosarubicondior.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/what-warning-would-you-put-in-gideon.html for the succinct list).

Many of these so called 'values' are clearly unacceptable in a civilised society, so perhaps Christians need to bring the Bible up to date.

Mr Cameron is also very keen to promote the teaching of religion within schools.  If this were objective then perhaps we should not worry because pupils would be taught about the various religions, the fact that many are atheists and agnostics, and then encouraged to think for themselves about what they believe.  This is not the case however, schools teach their own doctrine thus a Church of England school teaches their own brand of Christianity with little or no reference to the alternatives.  I have seen examples of this with my own nephew and niece - though they stood up and thought for themselves. Read more at http://scepticalcurmudgeon.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/religious-indoctrination.html

Finally, he talks of suppression of Christian rights.  The issue that annoys me most here is prayers as part of council meetings.  These were recently declared illegal, however the PM has decided to change the law so they can be made legal again.  We have a very varied society and many council members will not be of the Christian faith, yet Christian prayers are to be imposed upon them.  This is unacceptable.  What is wrong with allowing a period before the meeting and separate from it in which those who wish to do so may pray or have a time of personal reflection - this should be acceptable to all as those who do not wish to partake simply arrive later for the actual meeting which constitutes the business of the council.

I feel that Christianity is being forced upon the country, whether we like it or not.  I doubt my letter to David Cameron will have any effect, but by that means and through this blog I am trying to show that we do not all agree with Christianity, or in my case any religion.